Category: tech

OpenOffice Custom Quotes
28 April 2008

I have been driven mad for the last week or so by the silly slanty quote marks that OpenOffice insists on using instead of the normal ones. It is especially annoying when adding code snippets to presentations!

To turn these off go to:

Tools > Autocorrect > Custom Quotes tab

And until …
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Installing VMWare Tools
21 April 2008

I recently did some work with Debian Etch virtual machines which I downloaded from the good people at thoughtpolice. Here are my notes on getting the VMWare tools added to that machine.

To be able to do anything interesting with a virtual machine, you need to install the VMWare tools …
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VMWare Virtual Machines on NTFS
17 April 2008

I keep having a problem with my virtual machines. I'm running kubuntu but the virtual machines are on an NTFS partition (because I use them from windows occasionally). The error message appears at startup and goes like this:

VMware Player unrecoverable error: (vcpu-0)

Failed to allocate page for guest RAM …
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Geekup Talk
17 April 2008

I did mention recently that I had arranged to speak at the local GeekUp group. Well, the event itself was last night and although I did have speaking nerves I think it went OK.

I've uploaded the slides I used to Slideshare, so you can find them here. The talk …
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GeekSpeakr
14 April 2008

I saw this article on linuxchix about the new register of women speakers that has been set up by Brenda Wallace of linuxchix. The site is called geekspeakr and although it claims to be "very alpha" they are currently registering female speakers. I don't have a lot of speaking experience …
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Speaking at GeekUp in Leeds
13 April 2008

This week I will be giving a 20:20 talk at the GeekUp event in Leeds, entitled "Enterprise Web Development". The 20:20 talk format allows talks with 20 slides, with 20 seconds allowed for each slide. Wish me luck :)

If you're local to Leeds, I'd love to see you …
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Ubuntu/Kubuntu and mod_rewrite
25 March 2008

I just spent a couple of days, on and off, fiddling with my apache setup on a kubuntu box. I had a site with some very weird and scary rewrite rules which I needed to do some development work with and I just could not get the site to work …
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Geshi and Serendipity for Code Snippets
25 March 2008

I write on technical subjects on this site on a fairly regular basis, and nothing annoys me more than blog software which "eats" long lines of code or renders it in a difficult-to-read way. Happily Serendipity (or s9y for short) has a plugin for geshi.

About GeSHi

I thought "geshi …
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Adding Markup to Comments in Serendipity
24 March 2008

I switched over to serendipity as my blog platform about 6 months ago and although I haven't been blown away by it, its a better tool for this job than textpattern was. I liked textpattern a lot but serendipity is better for what I need. There were a few things …
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Debian Change Keyboard Layout
17 March 2008
I recently downloaded a virtual machine which had all the default factory settings in it - including an American keyboard layout. To change this on Debian Etch I simply used:
```
dpkg-reconfigure console-data
```
and then followed the online prompts. For reference (i.e. the next time I have this problem), the | (pipe …
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Kubuntu Installation - Disk Partitioning
14 March 2008

I'm installing Kubuntu Gutsy Gibbon onto my Dell Vostro 1500 and the first problem I hit was that the Live CD was entirely unable to repartition the disks.

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First Manchester Girl Geek Dinner
13 March 2008

Last night I attended the first Manchester Girl Geek Dinner. I am very excited about the Girl Geek Dinner events arriving in the north, there's a lot of activity up here and I'm already involved in other local events such as GeekUp and BarCamp.

I'm based in Leeds, so it …
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